Various types of telecommunications messaging systems are well known to the art. They include voice-mail systems, e-mail systems, and multi-media messaging systems. Often while a message recipient is retrieving (e.g., listening to) received messages, he or she needs to jot down information, such as names, addresses, numbers, or parts of the message, until he or she is ready to act on this information. The need arises from the capacity limits and fallibility of human short-term memory.
Acting on the information may involve any kind of action, such as making calendar or schedule notes, entering data in a database, making a telephone call or sending an electronic message in response to the received message, etc. A common theme that predicates these actions is that the information to be acted upon needs to be retained only temporarily--until the action is taken. Hence, the message recipient typically takes notes on a piece of paper while retrieving messages, and then discards the notes after taking the requisite action. Not only is this inconvenient for the message recipient, but it also provides opportunities for the recipient to transcribe the information incorrectly and to misplace the information. A further disadvantage is that known messaging systems do not provide for automatically calling others or sending messages to others in response to the received messages, except in cases where the return call or message is to the originator of the received message and the originator is a subscriber of the messaging system. In other instances, the message recipient must terminate the message-retrieval transaction and then initiate a new transaction (e.g., manually place a call or address a message) in response to the retrieved message. Again, this is inconvenient for the message recipient and provides opportunities for mis-addressing (e.g., mis-dialing) the response.